Behind The Scenes Of Netflix's The Great Hack - David Carroll

David Carroll is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design. The Great Hack is one of my favourite documentaries of 2019 and today we get a fascinating and unique insight into the story behind Cambridge Analytica from one of the key figures in this controversy. Extra Stuff: Follow Professor Carroll on Twitter - https://twitter.com/profcarroll Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A weird company has been working in elections around the world for a long time and allegedly worked on the Brexit campaign and the Trump presidential campaigns as well as others. For people who are hoping for a movie that gives you the proof of whether or not this stuff worked, those people will be disappointed. This is not a movie about whether it worked. This is a movie about whether we can live in a democracy where this stuff is going on. We really can't know whether any of this was the defining factor in any of these elections. There's no control group in elections. You cannot determine whether or not this affected that. It's all of the above. When people think about why did people vote for Brexit and why did people vote for Trump, there's no single reason. There is

• 0:44Speaker 00

  a perfect storm of reasons. I think one of the most alarming things about this company and this movie is that fundamental idea that Americans are working on British politics and Brits are working on American politics. We should just be working on our own politics and that's it. To be honest, the popularity of this movie will inspire more bad guys to do more bad things. So it shows us that we need to inoculate ourselves against this and we need to make sure that our governments are ready to try and withstand these kinds of attempts to subvert and industrialize democracy itself.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Professor David Carroll. Professor, welcome to the show.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  It's great to be on here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  What is your life like at the moment?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  It's pretty overwhelming. The response to the film is mind blowing, mostly because I get so many messages per minute from people around the world saying that their mind is blown. So this sort of mutual mind blowing is happening right now and it's overwhelming. I never expected it to go this big.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  So I mean, you were in the press during the first iteration, like the real time unveiling of this particular storyline. And now there's this sort of recap of all of that that's got Netflix's power behind it. So yeah, it's a, it doesn't surprise me that you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by that. The last couple of days, it's only been out for Upon when we're recording now, like two days, I think 24th it came out on Netflix. And usually when people suggest something to me and different spheres of awareness say the same thing, I'm like, right, I need to, I need to take notice of this. And in the space of two days, I had like five people like, man, man, if you watch that, the great

• 2:40Chris Williamson?

  hack on Netflix, it's sick. You gotta go watch it. I'm like, okay, cool. Fair enough. So yes, for the people who do not know why your life is chaos at the moment and, and what's been going on, could you give us a rundown of what we're talking about?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Sure. So a weird company has been working in elections around the world for a long time and allegedly worked on the Brexit campaign and the Trump presidential campaigns as well as others. And the movie looks at the stories of three people who were involved in learning more and unraveling the scandal behind that. So it follows Carol Cadwallader, who was the primary journalist for The Observer and The Guardian, who really uncovered the story for the press and the world. It covers Brittany Kaiser, who was really high up in the company

• 3:39Speaker 00

  and was with the company up until the very end. And she tries to come out and spill the information that everybody is seeking. And then myself, who learned that I could try to get my data from the company using British law. And it follows my legal struggle, still to this day, trying to get my data back, which, under British law, is required. And so it's been fascinating to see how the British government, being Parliament and the Information Commissioner, have been the strongest force in the world to hold the company accountable,

• 4:21Speaker 00

  even more accountable than the United States government and the United States regulators. So the movie is a story about how journalism and citizens

• 4:32Speaker 00

  And the law can hack back against these technological forces. For people who are hoping for a movie that explains and gives you the proof of whether or not this stuff worked, those people will be disappointed. This is not a movie about whether it worked. This is a movie about whether we can live in a democracy where this stuff is going on.

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the big question that hangs over the top of all of it is, did they do it? Right? Like, if you watch the movie, at the end of it, there's still the natural slipperiness of large corporations like this and the specific evasive tactics that get used in hearings and stuff like that. There's no straight answer. There isn't a, yes, we did it, no, we didn't. And for every accusation, so there's an accusation, they worked with leave.eu. This is Cambridge Analytica, it's the company that we're talking about. There's an accusation, they worked with leave.eu. And it, there's some pretty damning evidence, like emails going backwards and forwards. Brittany, who was one of the head execs there, sitting on the announcement for the leave.eu thing, et cetera, et cetera.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  And yet, when asked, Andrew Nix, who is the head guy at Cambridge Analytica, says, no, we didn't do it. Was it Andrew Nix?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Alexander.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  Alexander Nix, sorry.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes, and he says, no, we didn't. So even that is like, no straight answers. Does it feel a little bit like trying to play whack-a-mole with this?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Well, it's really interesting. It's been a story about finding the truth and realizing the fragility of truth in this age.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  And the reality that this story has intrinsic ambiguity, because we really can't know whether any of this was the defining factor in any of these elections. There's no control group in elections. You cannot determine whether or not this affected that. It's a, it's a, it's all of the above. When people think about, why did people vote for Brexit? And why did people vote for Trump? There's no single reason. There is a perfect storm of reasons. And so, you know, this is one of the reasons. But what it really shows us is, who is determining truth now? And I really sought truth out of the only place I knew that it could be reliable in this

• 6:55Speaker 00

  age, and that is in the courts. Legal truth is now the only pure truth because uh the machine, the media machine uh is a truth distortion device and then social media is a truth distortion device. So when we had people lying to reporters and we have people even lying to lawmakers, the best way then to find the truth would be in the courts and in forensic documents and basically what is on the servers. Uh and so luckily um the UK Information Commissioner sees the servers under criminal warrant, an important fact that the film depicts, an important fact that many people do not

• 7:40Speaker 00

  realize, and has been conducting an incredible forensic investigation on the servers. And so they say in the autumn, there will be a public report on what is on those servers. And to me, that will be the most reliable, most definitive um set of evidence to answer the question, who was Cambridge Analytica? What did they have? How did they use it? And could it have had an effect? Uh we could, we shouldn't even um try to make those assessments until we have hard forensic evidence of what they had. If it turns out that their data was none, nothing special, let's look at the data and decide that.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  If it turns out that they really did have this extraordinary database, let's see what was in there and see what could happen. At the minimum, we know what's out there so that we can think about the future, the next elections that are coming up right away. This technology is only going to expand in its capabilities. And to be honest, the popularity of this movie will inspire more bad guys to do more bad things. So it shows us that we need to inoculate ourselves against this and we need to make sure that our governments are ready to try and withstand these kinds of attempts to subvert and industrialize democracy itself.

• 9:05Chris Williamson?

  Is that the scene where the police or the law enforcements go into the office building and then pull the blinds down and you can kind of see through?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:16Chris Williamson?

  That's correct. For anyone who's watching, that was, I wondered what the comeuppance of that was, right? Because Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy, went into administration quite early in the proceedings of when they realised that there was some shit incoming, for want of a better term. And I wondered how much of that stuff were they able to get rid of? Sure, everyone will be thinking, well, what did they wipe? Like, if the, if law enforcement find X, then what didn't they find? What had already perhaps managed to be binned, et cetera, et cetera? So, could you just give the listeners a background to Cambridge Analytica? Sort of where they'd been before the, the two main situations that we come up against,

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  which is Brexit and Trump's campaign in 2016?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Sure. So, the parent company or the main company, which is called SCL, it stands for, used to stand for Strategic Communications Laboratories. It's actually a company that's, I think about 20 years old. It's been around for a while, actually.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  And when you dig into the history of the company, they've been working in what they call election management and also defence contracting for quite some time now.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And ultimately, when I first got into this story, it actually was the military work that disturbed me and troubled me the most. This idea that a defence contractor was now getting into the business of elections and the boundary between the military industrial complex and free and fair elections had been breached by the fact that the company started a elections division called Cambridge Analytica.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Um, especially to get involved in uh elections in the United States and to provide services to the Republican Pa- Party. And in many ways, in response to the success of the Barack Obama campaign, the sort of arms race that political parties are engaged in, in one-upping each other uh to win elections uh using the latest technologies. So I think the film does a good job of acknowledging that reality. Um, and that with each successive election, it gets more and more insane. Uh, so what are we gonna do to slow down the pace of escalation? There's sort of a mutually assured destruction undertone to this, that if we continue to allow

• 11:55Speaker 00

  military contractors to internationalize and industrialize democracy. And commercialize. And commercialize it to the highest bidder, and that there really are British aristocrats thinking they can like reconstruct the British Empire through companies like this. Um, it's a kind of new colonialism. And um, as an American, um, one of the first sort of alarming things that I felt when I discovered who this, what this really was and found some forensic proof that confirmed my worst fears is, I really did have the feeling of like, why is

• 12:35Speaker 00

  a British company interfering in my election? It wasn't about the Russians, it was about the British. Um, any other country. Two hundred and fifty years later, it's still the British. So it's like, there shouldn't be any election of interference. Um, ele- ele- elections should be domestic affairs. And I think one of the most alarming things about this company and this movie is that fundamental idea that. Americans are working on British politics and Brits are working on American politics. We should just be working on our own politics and that's it.

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there was some pretty harrowing examples of the stuff that SCL in their military form had managed to achieve prior to this, right? So they'd done some stuff in Trinidad and Tobago where they'd come up with a campaign which essentially was targeted at young voters, but they knew that encouraging young voters not to vote was going to asymmetrically affect a particular demographic. That demographic was the one that they didn't want to vote and it was the Indian and is it African on the other side?

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's in the film points out that every country and every electorate has a unique kind of cultural political condition. And in Trinidad and Tobago, you have this sort of racial and ethnic divide between the people who migrated from India and the people who were brought there by the slave trade. So the Afro-Caribbeans. And so, and then those divisions that are built into society can be exploited and fomented to manipulate democracies.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  And the film does a chilling job of showing how the sort of military mindset of going into a population and analyzing it for its weaknesses can be used against it. It doesn't necessarily even need big data to do so. And I think the film does a good job of showing how, yeah, this is a company that's been around for a while and has been developing these tactics. And then what has sort of escalated it is that they have adopted big data analytics to further

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  weaponize these tactics above what they already were.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  So I think that is what is alarming. Now, it's not in the movie, but there are research and reports that somehow SCL got its hands on the data from the Trinidadian ISP. And so did use some data harvesting to try to develop models of the electorate. And so what's interesting too is this movie just sort of gives you enough to Understand and become alarmed, but there's so many threads that the viewer could take from the movie and then do their own investigations and dive deeper and find that the movie is just scratching the surface in a lot of ways.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is the hub in the centre of a spoke of rabbit holes that you can tumble down on the internet, which is the reason why I only got about five hours of sleep last night after I finished watching it. So thanks for that, David.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:56Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, coming back to the SCL thing, which I think is important for people that are listening, even the ones that have watched the documentary to kind of frame what we're talking about here, the fact that they were able to enact social change without big data. So big data was allowing them to target more effectively, but their understanding of behavioural economics and behaviour change generally allowed them to distribute a message, a social campaign across all of Trinidad and Tobago and downstream from that, not even like the first or second order effect, like the fifth, sixth order effect was the one that they wanted and it was going to discriminate and it caused enough of a swing in voter turnout to affect the

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  election in the direction that allegedly their particular employer or the person that commissioned that work wanted. And then they've pushed this forward and then created the not, well, I don't want to say non-militarised version, but like the commercial aspect of that, which is what became Cambridge Analytica. And you've got this really sort of shady Bond-type villain guy, Alexander Nix, who's the guy that's behind it all, it would appear. And the whole, the whole company, when you start to learn about Cambridge Analytica and particularly about Alexander himself, just immediately makes me think about a Dan Brown

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  novel, you know, like one of the like evil geniuses from a Dan Brown novel that's in that sort of place. And it's really, it's very harrowing, like as you're watching it, incredibly harrowing.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there are characters in the company which are not in the film or are sort of secondary characters. So, you know, Alexander Nix seems to be the real salesman behind the operation, but there are other figures in the company that are not in the movie. A key character who's not mentioned once is a person named Nigel Oakes, and he is reported to be more of the brains behind the operation, the expert in behavioral dynamics, he calls it, which is what you were describing, like economic psychology, behavioral economics.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  And it really comes from the advertising world. He used to be at Saatchi and Saatchi and really did, you know, pursue a path of taking the principles of how advertising and marketing works and applying those to political warfare. And has done work for governments in winning hearts and minds, especially after nine eleven. So after September eleventh, the focus of especially the US military, but all many allies sort of started

• 18:54Speaker 00

  to work on how you could counter violent extremism without escalating more violence. And so using these kinds of techniques were deployed. And Nigel Oakes is really the hidden figure behind that work. And he's still in operation. There is one company that did not go bankrupt or insolvent. It's called SCL Insights Limited, and it's the last surviving SCL company. And according to my lawsuit, I discovered that he acquired the assets of SCL Group and moved them into SCL Insights. And so that is a continuing

• 19:37Speaker 00

  concern. And I also was able to determine that

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Just days before the scandal exploded last spring, so it was sort of the weekend of March 16th, 17, 18, when the whole thing exploded, that, that week, SCL Group, led by Nigel Oakes, had given a presentation to the State Department in the United States about countering violent extremism with their techniques. And that was from a contract that SCL Group earned during the Trump transition.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  And there's public documents that show that Mike Flynn, who was a character in the Mueller investigation and who was caught lying to the FBI and was fired from the Obama campaign and fired from the Trump campaign, and he had a previously undisclosed consulting gig with SCL Group. And the timeline overlaps in a stunning way, where he had a consulting gig with SCL in November and December of 2016 during the transition. And then there are also public documents revealed where the company was given its contract to the State Department.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  And then, right before the whole thing explodes, we, we see that, that, you know, they were actually delivering their work on countering violent extremism. And one of the interesting things, when you sort of become well-known for this stuff, is anonymous people start sending you things. So I was sent the presentation deck that Nigel Oakes presented to the State Department that day. And it was a fascinating look into what SCL's work for governments looks like.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  And how the same techniques, as they would claim, be used for good. And arguably, yes, like, if you can convince...

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Young Muslims to not join ISIS, that is a good thing. No one can dispute that is what we want. So, an interesting, like, sort of, the data point that I found interesting from that presentation was, SCL's methodology had shown that the primary motivator for young men in the Islamic world is actually not religious ideology, it is economics. That most young disaffected men join these kinds of terror groups because of the lack of economic opportunity.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  There's more opportunity to get paid, uh, if you become a terrorist unfortunately, in many of these failed societies. And then the tactics that they're recommending are related to this observation that, you

• 22:44Chris Williamson?

  know- Where did they get that observation from? Do you know how they got that?

• 22:47Speaker 00

  That's really their on-the-ground survey research, their old-fashioned kind of market re-research. So not really the big data analytics. What we were talking about before, the sort of good old-fashioned, on-the-ground, panel research, interviews, they send out like crews to do interviews, they do surveys, um, they do individual interviews, sort of good old-fashioned qualitative research. And that actually initially informs some of their tactics and methods, and then that tends to be sort of further augmented by big data analytics to sort of further validate the initial assumptions that might be developed in a qualitative sense.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  But just, to me, it was so disturbing and so fascinating that essentially the same company that was telling the State Department that the reason there is ISIS is because of the failures of capitalism. And that same company was, you know, telling the president that the way that he could win the election was by fomenting the divisions in American society and fomenting Islamophobia and fomenting a fear of the other, um, in order to win. It was just so chilling to realize that the same company was-

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Advising both things.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Um. And it's astonishing to comprehend that.

• 24:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it really is. I think one thing that comes to mind is as technology progresses, the same way as a wheel could have been made to make a cart, which allows someone, a farmer in a field, to pull their hay around more easily, that same wheel can also be fitted to the bottom of a tank to make a war machine. As technology begins to develop and improve, and is easier for people to get hold of, these situations, the line between good and evil actually becomes more magnified, and the implications become greater. And that's why stuff like this, I think, is so chilling, that people can see. Also, another thing

• 25:03Chris Williamson?

  is that it's at the mercy of whims of humans, right? Like, these, Cambridge Analytica or SCL or whatever, could, in some different iteration of the universe, have been totally righteous and super virtuous, and been like, right, we're gonna help humanitarian causes, and we're gonna have enact change so that people donate the right amounts, or so that people improve their recycling, so that people, you know, companies understand that climate changes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they have this power, and the direction in which they choose to swing it is totally down to them, until they're litigated into a box. And once it's out of a different box, once it's been opened, that door's been opened,

• 25:46Chris Williamson?

  and this technology exists, it's not going back in. Like, it's not going anywhere. So, one of the first things I think that a lot of people will be thinking, one of the biggest questions I've had so far, which I want to ask yourself, is what do we do about companies that hold this sort of power? You have them across nation states, you have them outside of the jurisdiction of one particular government. What, have you got any idea about how we begin to tackle this problem?

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Yes, I I definitely would agree that, you know, that's people say the genie's out of the bottle. We can't go back to the innocent world that we thought we had. Um, it's true. Uh, and like I said before, um, some critics of this movie could say that, you know, you've done a terrific advertising campaign for these kinds of bad actors. You've glorified them and their magical abilities. Um, but I have felt that it was worth creating the awareness of what is underneath um these structures.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  And it was worth being able to tell the story of how individual action can um interface with government accountability. And so it's a real stress test for our institutions, which um are being tested to the limit in terms of can they, as it said in the movie, as it's as the the final um report from Parliament suggests that the are our institutions and regulations fit for purpose? Uh, they were designed to do something and this whole scandal is the ultimate stress test of all these institutions across different countries.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  We we have, we've had a transnational investigation that has involved at at at times um the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Um, the film To Keep It Simple uh has actually not included some very important strands of the scandal. Uh, so there's a whole-

• 28:02Chris Williamson?

  Are you able to tell us about some of those?

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Sure, sure. So um, there's a whole um part of the scandal that involves a Canadian company called Aggregate IQ, um, which the film does not mention. Uh, when you get deep into the rabbit hole, you realize it's a huge part of the story. Um, it's where Chris Wiley came from. Um, and aggregate IQ is central to a lot of the scandal related to Brexit. Um, and the, um, illegal coordination and illegal spending part of the, um, Brexit scandal, and that side of the story is much, interestingly, much more connected to,

• 28:44Speaker 00

  um, Boris Johnson's sort of wing of the conservative side, whereas The Great Hack focuses more on the Aaron Banks, Nigel Farage side of, um, the, the British political, um, establishment. And so that whole part of the scandal got cut off and chunked off because it would get a complicated story even more unwieldy. But interestingly, I think the, um, the BBC HBO fictionalization of Brexit, uh, that starred Benedict Cumberbatch, that actually is dramatizing that side of the scandal. So I actually think the filmmakers felt justified in like leaving that whole thing aside because it has been dramatized already.

• 29:29Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  There's no need to re do that, but for viewers trying to put the pieces together, if you've seen the Brexit movie, that's the side of the story that The Great Hack didn't bother touching. Instead, it focused on the more Farage and Trump and Bannon side of the scandal. So, but back to the question of like, what can we do about it or what's possible? Um, clearly the need for international cooperation has been de-hemonstrated. Um, that lawmakers have to collaborate as allies to hold bad actors and rogue operations accountable,

• 30:10Speaker 00

  as well as legitimate massive multinational corporations like Facebook and Google. That they're both, it's both a responsibility of sort of international cooperation because no one government or state can handle it by themselves. That indeed it took the UK Digital Media, Culture and Sport Committee to take a really aggressive stance on getting to the answers and those lawmakers.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Did not take a deferential stance to anyone, not SCL Cambridge Analytica, not Facebook. They were aggressive because they knew they had to be, whereas by comparison, US lawmakers in Congress and Senate exhibited tremendous deference to Facebook because it is a domestic company. There was a fear of hurting an American business. When you go back and like, you know, listen to those testimonies, a lot of times the lawmakers would, especially on the Republican

• 31:24Speaker 00

  side, but even on the Democratic side, would just like start out with, Facebook is an amazing business, it's the greatest, you know, part of American

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a compliment sandwich, isn't it?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, they start out flattering him and then maybe sort of sneak a good question or a critique in, whereas the UK lawmakers just were aggressive, so

• 31:50Chris Williamson?

  Say how it is, David, they don't give a fuck. That's, that's, that's

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Oh sure, no, no, no, and we needed that. We needed lawmakers with power to be aggressive. And the parliamentarians in Ottawa were also really aggressive, were also took a firm stand. And so, to me, it shows that, and then of course, there was also this grand committee that was formed, which include 11 parliaments from around the world, and Zuckerberg refused to appear before any of them. So, there was defiance by characters like Alexander Nix,

• 32:33Speaker 00

  who were willing to lie to these guys. The heads of aggregate IQ were completely defiant to their government, so the guys who got caught in Canada, when you can go back and watch those hearings, and just like, it's insane to see these guys just stonewall their own government. And then the way that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg didn't even have the balls to appear before parliaments in the UK, in Canada, and even this grand assembly. So

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Because Facebook is a superstate, it requires international cooperation to stand up to them. No one country alone is going to do it.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  Question I've had on the tip of my tongue throughout all of this, how culpable is Facebook in this? And where does their culpability lie? Because they are not Cambridge Analytica, they are somehow the conduit slash communications medium. How does Facebook fit into all of this sort of stuff?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  I wasn't able to attend the screening and the panel in Washington DC this week, but Shoshana Zuboff was on a panel in the one that was screened on Capitol Hill. She's the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the sort of definitive treatise on this larger issue. She was highly influential in the filmmakers' vision of this. Roger McNamee is a proponent of her as well. And she made the comment that basically, and I think this is it, is Facebook was the host and Cambridge Analytica was the parasite. That that's the story here, is

• 34:26Speaker 00

  that the Facebook is the, has tremendous culpability in creating this machine that had no mechanisms for security. That it was just used as it was meant to be used. It was used to sell, you know, it was built to sell skin cream and ski vacations and was deliberately designed to also then sell candidates and allow candidates to find voters. And it was deliberately designed and sold to sell election outcomes. And campaigns were infallible.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Like, the movie does a good job of reminding people that Facebook put its own employees directly embedded into the Trump campaign.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  And the movie does a good job of then hinting that

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Facebook had to have been aware that they were working side by side with Cambridge Analytica embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016. Despite the fact that the company had identified Cambridge Analytica as a rogue operator that had violated their policies, that had required them to certify the deletion of illicit data.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  And so that Facebook knew that Cambridge Analytica were, it was a sketchy operation.

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think they allowed them to continue? Is someone getting a backhander somewhere? Is there pressure from litigation or someone that has some power? Why are they allowing Cambridge Analytica to continue?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  That's the key question.

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  What do you think?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  I mean, there are so many parts of the story that look like a cover up to us.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Weird things that Facebook did

• 36:33Speaker 00

  that make us lose trust in them. When you dig, when you dig into the story. So

• 36:40Speaker 00

  when you realize that

• 36:44Speaker 00

  the, the two academics from Cambridge University that created the company that actually did the data harvesting were Alexander Kogan and this, and, and Alexander Kogan's sort of

• 36:59Speaker 00

  post-doc researcher, an American named Joseph Chancellor. And they formed the company together. And even though Kogan was the, the lead, he had a partner. And when Facebook discovered that the, the data was being sold, which was ill, which was against their own policies.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  They strangely ended up hiring Joseph Chancellor right into Facebook. So basically, a guy who was caught selling data, basically like using academic research as a as a way to obscure the commercialization of it to be used for political purposes. Um, you know, that is a very, um, you know, that's like against Facebook's own policies. It's also illegal in the United Kingdom. And they hired him. And he worked there for a while, and it was only when people started asking Facebook,

• 38:08Speaker 00

  meaning US senators on both sides of the aisle.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Who is Joseph Chancellor? Tell us about him. What is going on with him? Why? And they're basically asking like, why did you hire this guy?

• 38:22Speaker 00

  And they said they'll conduct an internal investigation. They said they completed their investigation and then he was dismissed without any explanation. And so he doesn't work for Facebook anymore. He's never been interviewed. He's never made a public statement.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Nobody knows anything about him. And, um, it's just mysterious. Uh, there's too many like unexplained things for us to, um, just keep going on and, you know, every, every, every, everything is fine.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  Just pulling on, pulling on all of the different threads. Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, the other important, um, part of this that in, in it sort of shows signs of a cover up is the Attorney General in Washington DC, uh, Carl Raisin, has filed a lawsuit against, uh, Facebook for Cambridge Analytica because it, um, violated consumer protection laws in the District of Columbia. And it's one of the most, um, it's one of the lawsuits in the US that I'm following the closest. Um, and he has, after the release of the movie, he actually refiled, um, his, uh, demand to have internal emails unsealed.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  And because he's in the discovery of that lawsuit, he's gotten emails that show Facebook employees in Washington DC knew about Cambridge Analytica way earlier than has been publicly disclosed. And there are specific emails that are redacted that you can see, and it's like them talking about Cambridge Analytica. And Facebook is desperate not to have these emails unsealed because it will show what they knew about this company, when they knew about it, and who knew about it. And the who, what, when is still unanswered. And Zuckerberg asserted to Congress under oath that he learned about Cambridge Analytica

• 40:25Speaker 00

  from the first Guardian article in December 2015, which is incredulous. And even if that's true,

• 40:35Speaker 00

  then it means that there is a management crisis at this company that you could find a military contractor harvesting data on your platform, and you do not escalate it to the C-level suite. Like, if that's the internal story, then that is a damning story of mismanagement. Or Zuckerberg committed perjury. That's like, that's the only explanation that I can understand from knowing the details here.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  And that, I think, is why Facebook is desperate to keep those emails sealed. Because as soon as you get a verifiable email of... Basically, what I worry about is a Washington DC employee said, "We did some Googling on this weird company. Yeah, they're a defense contractor. They're scraping data. What do we do about it?"

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  What do you reckon the low level anxiety rating is in Facebook at the moment? Like, it's just gonna be, everyone's just going to be walking around with terror hanging over their heads at the moment, that something's going to come out, because I don't see how this ends well for them. As you've said, there's two, two options. One is that they are malicious in their purposeful deception, and the second is that they're incompetent in their naivety.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  I think it's both.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  That they, they achieved so much power so quickly, and did not understand the power that they wielded, and they did not have the moral culture to understand their power as it was being abused at scale, by multiple ways. So, we can tell that there's been like a kind of reckoning, but at the same time, the business model is inherently immoral.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  And it is not, there's no, the business model is asymmetric in its power, and it's ultimately about dispossession. And the movie does a good job of, of expressing that

• 42:59Speaker 00

  our, that, that, that the bargain, the grand bargain of social media is completely asymmetric, and is dispossessing us of not only ourselves and our free will, but it has a collective harm to our, our all societies, and that the whole deal has to be renegotiated. In order for us to, yeah.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  The implications are really, really broad, aren't they? Um, one of the things that I've been thinking, I wonder whether you thought this yourself. I certainly know that some of the listeners will have done. As I was watching the movie, I was thinking to myself, well, yeah, but you know, those like some people, some voters might have got taken in by this particular disinformation or the memes or whatever, the campaigns that were put forward. But like, you know, I'm, I'm probably a bit self-aware or maybe I'm not online as much as them or whatever it is. I, I found myself coming up with my own excuses for why I wasn't affected. I wonder, I wonder how common that is that we, we believe we're so aware of our own biases.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  But looking at some of the stats that were cited at the end, is it like 60,000 Facebook ads were online for Hillary? And 1.1 million were online for Trump. Is that roundabout right?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's a shame that there hasn't been interest in, uh, doing the postmortem on the Hillary digital campaign. There, there, there are different kinds of skeletons in the Hillary digital campaign closet. Uh, and there's only been a few scant accounts of what went on there. But I think it's an equally interesting story that I hope somebody tells someday soon because it's a different parable on the other side of the story. So if I understand it, Eric Schmidt of Google was, um, very active in directly supporting the Hillary digital operation.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  And they had a, um, AI brain essentially that they called Ava, named after, um, uh, Ava Lovelace, who is the, um, you know, really important, uh, female programmer in the history of programming. She basically invented the algorithm. And it was basically like Alexa or Siri for.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Digital campaigning. They would literally like ask Ava, where should we run ads tomorrow? And where should Hillary go campaigning tomorrow? And Ava would crunch the numbers and give them the answers. And my hypothesis is that they were so enchanted with this, this basically immature AI, the shiny object of asking Ava for the magic answers. And they believed this robot way too much. And by sort of my worst case scenario, um, sort of imagination is that they asked, um, Ava, where should Hillary go? And Ava never said go to Wisconsin. So they never went to Wisconsin.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  And Hillary needed to have campaigned really hard in Wisconsin.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  So you think that's an identifier for why there was some glaring omissions in a campaign tour?

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Could be. We don't have enough information to know, but that's what I worry about, that the, the sort of unforced errors of the digital strategy were informed by something or someone who, who made those sort of core strategic errors? Um, how is the data abused to make mistakes? Um, and how was the faith in technology overblown? Um, how is this like arms race to be better than the opposing side? How did that bite the Democrats in the ass in the end? They were like using technology that was not ready for prime time.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  That was, that was, you know, version point one instead of.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  The Cambridge Analytica version 4.0. Yeah, exactly.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  And that good old fashioned direct marketing techniques actually won the day. And I think that that's Brad Parscale's, um, core competency is just sort of.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Old fashioned direct marketing techniques on steroids. And when you give that guy a huge behudget, he gets Trump voters by getting donations and selling merchandise and getting people to go to rallies. It is just old fashioned direct marketing. And I don't think we should underestimate the power of people, you know, investing in a candidate with their own money, buying merchandise and branding themselves with the campaign and going to these rallies, which are the closest thing you're ever going to see to fascist rallies in the United States and, you know, being a part of this highly

• 48:15Speaker 00

  charged, very terrifying, on the ground movement.

• 48:19Chris Williamson?

  There's a question hanging over everyone's heads, even those of us in the UK who watched with, kind of like watching a sitcom, a terrifying sitcom unfold when the Hillary and Trump election night went on. Interesting, but not our problem, kind of. There's a question hanging over everyone's heads, I think, still to this day, even when I hear people talk about it, how did this happen? Or now it's how did that happen, I suppose? And this recent exposure that's coming out of the great hack adds another, not excuse, but another reason, another layer to that, that there's all of these questions, there's

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  a Mueller report, there's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there's Facebook, there's all of these sort of different elements. And people, do you think people are starting to get a grasp of how did this happen? Because everyone's been post hoc rationalizing, it was people wanted change, the Democrats tried, started to play the identity politics game and they started to subsist to the left, too far left, et cetera, et cetera. All that's just post hoc rationalization, because no one saw it, except for like Scott Adams on Twitter, no one saw it in advance.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  And now there's more elements of this coming out. Do you think people are starting to get more of a grasp? Or is it just the first in a number of unveilings to come?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  I hope people stop looking for single reasons for things and start to understand it's a it's a complex network of factors that interconnect and interrelate and amplify each other. So a sort of as time has passed, we're able to actually have a more sophisticated understanding. I like the way the film also points to things that happened a long time ago that contributed toward this outcome, this sort of butterfly effect that things happen and then the resulting effects echo down the road. So the way that the mortgage crisis in 2008 still reverberates to the day this day, the

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Great Recession that wiped the wealth out of so many Americans. What's not mentioned in the film, which I think is another significant social issue in the United States, is the opiates crisis and the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and the kind of crazy reverse racism that occurred there. So basically this hypothesis that the pharmaceutical industry like over marketed opiates and doctors over prescribed to working white patients and actually would not prescribe to African American patients.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  And so the white population in the States is now like in this addiction plague and we're just realizing it and has destroyed families, destroyed communities, especially in these white working class states. So you had the Great Recession caused by the greed of Wall Street. You had this opiates crisis caused by the greed of pharmaceuticals. Now you have this like crisis in democracy called caused by the greed of Silicon Valley and the surveillance capitalists. So it's like a reckoning of years, actually, in the making of sort of the self-destructive

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Pensions of American culture, growth at all costs, greed is good, kind of way of being. And then we haven't even mentioned Fox News, which traces back to Ronald Reagan when he got rid of the, what was called the fairness doctrine, where the FCC that regulated broadcast used to be a doctrine. You have to give both sides to the issue if you use the public airwaves. And Reagan got rid of that, and that created the opportunity to create partisan news outlets.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  Is that still?

• 52:32Speaker 00

  And talk radio.

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  Is that only in the States? Because the UK doesn't seem to have that same split.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, up until the eighties, broadcast news, broadcast news in the US was very balanced because of the fairness doctrine, this idea of the government owned the airwaves, the spectrum.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  News companies leased the airwaves from the government, a public good. And in order for them to do that, they had to have a fair use of the airwaves. Reagan got rid of that, let people do whatever they want with the public airwaves. It created the potential to then split news into political viewpoints. So this like dividing the, you know, sort of dividing the nation rather than keeping it unified through technology and government policy and media is something that started in the eighties.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  Thirty years in the making.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then it just built and built and built. And then in the early 2000s, the internet came and radically changed the whole media and business ecology of the world, but especially how news and media and advertising worked. So that contributed towards the acceleration of these trends, not only into like hyper partisan news outlets, but individualized, hyper partisan news feeds.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  And and then the way that our personal data was collected without rights, without restriction, wild west of surveillance capitalism to create this business incentive to trap people into filter bubbles, to use fear and anxiety to boost engagement to the maximum levels. Um. We built the machine that tore us apart because it made the charts go up. And that's all people were looking at their their engagement charts, their financial return charts, um, saving money on their ad chart. The whole industry and society was just looking at these charts and we're not looking

• 55:02Speaker 00

  out the window at what was happening on on on the streets.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  We were asleep at the wheel.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  The businessmen got more profits and the users got some good cat memes every so often and everyone was happy and the world continued on until until this happened. One question, I can't remember whether you uh mention it in the documentary or not. Why did you file in the UK? What's specific about UK law?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a subtle takeaway that I hope a lot of people realize is I had no US lawyers, I had no rights or recourse in my own country. I only had rights in the United Kingdom and the reason for that is US voter data was processed in the United Kingdom, so therefore you get rights where your data is processed. If Cambridge Analytica had kept American voter data in the United States and not exported it abroad, then I would have had no rights or recourse at all. I could have requested the company and they could have ignored me and there would be

• 56:13Speaker 00

  no legal basis to challenge that. Because they were based in the UK, um, they were forced to respond to my request. And then the Information Commissioner and Parliament had jurisdiction.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  To further support and advance my complaint. And so it is an incredible parable of what you could start to call the splinter net. Whereas the internet works differently depending on where you are in the world. And right now, if you're in the EU and you're a resident of EU member states, you are protected by the GDPR in internet. Whereas we don't have the equivalent of the GDPR in the United States. So we don't have the basic rights that the GDPR enables. And one of the fascinating things that I learned about all this is

• 57:10Speaker 00

  because the EU is a relatively new institution, they have data protection rights enshrined in the Charter. So rights to your data is fundamental right to freedom of speech and freedom to get married and like all these things. It's fundamental because it was thought of in a world where we like knew this. The law that I was able to use is called the UK Data Protection Act of 1998. So astonishingly, the British Parliament passed a law at the dawn of the internet in 1998, where it was first being commercialized.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  And they had the wherewithal to predict that people would need basic data rights. We never did this in the United States. So there is nothing in the Constitution that guarantees your access to your data.

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  So whereas it is in law across the Atlantic. And so that's the lesson to Americans is there's a very specific right that we have to demand now. It is the right to our own data. And it has to be fundamental. It has to maybe even be in the Constitution. Like the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of speech, the right to your data is so fundamental in the 21st century. And this movie shows us why that matters. And I hope people take that away. And I hope that they then, when they are trying to, what do I do now? It is actually go to your lawmakers at the state and federal level and say,

• 58:50Speaker 00

  we need data rights, we need the, at least the equivalent rights of our friends in Europe and the UK.

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  That's a really, really interesting next step. The splinter net is something that I hadn't thought of, but you are totally right. Um, I have a, a couple of more questions that have been sent through to me. Um, the first one being that no matter how much traction this uh documentary gets, and I'm certain it's going to get a lot. Lawmakers are going to take time catching up. You guys have a fairly important election coming pretty soon. What do you think we can expect over the next year?

• 59:33Speaker 00

  So the first I hope is a realization that nothing has changed. We are not any more protected than we were um in 2016. Um, so the government did not act fast enough to protect us, even though it's all we've been talking about. Um, so the best we have is an awakening, a new awareness uh that we were asleep in 2016 and at least now we are awake. Um, but we should expect the same actors to do the same things they did before and even more sophisticated. So we just have to be even more vigilant

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  uh and try to inoculate ourselves and then not give up on what we need to do and to try to make this part of the campaign. Um, you know, it's an opportunity to pressure the politicians to confront this because one of the paradoxes here is on both sides of the aisle, especially in the United States, they really don't want to kneecap Facebook too much because they realize they need Facebook to stay in power.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  They need Facebook to motivate their voters and to target them. And so you're asking them to limit their own ability to stay in power. So we need to confront the extra challenge of asking our lawmakers to give us rights and reduce their ability to manipulate us, to keep them in power. And that's huge and really difficult. So we need to deal with that. And it's particularly interesting dynamic in the United States is the idea that there are laws passed at the state level. So California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act. So it's important that it's in California because obviously this is the home base of most of the industry.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  And it moves the United States more toward the GDPR. It's not as strong as the GDPR, but it moves the needle in that direction. So already now, if there's going to be a national privacy act, it's going to have to supersede the state law. And that's a fundamental sort of challenge to American politics, that, you know, whenever you override the states, you have a particular political debate. And so, so that's, that's basically, the industry is terrified of all of the states passing their own privacy laws. So then they have to deal with a patchwork of regulations.

• 1:02:09Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  The, the industry wants a national law badly. And so now they're basically going to have to figure out how to negotiate, the, the, the industry lobbyists are going to have to negotiate, what concessions are they going to give in order to supersede the state laws? And there are other states have laws in the works. So New York has a really strong privacy bill on the floor. It's even stronger than California's. And so the minute you get like New York and California passing laws, which have a huge economic power in the country, California is the fifth largest economy in the world, that that's going to be this muscular force that's going to...

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  Sort of run the debate in Washington DC. And so I'm hopeful for that. And it's sort of where the kind of federalist dynamic of American politics will come into play is that state voters will be able to influence the debate by passing laws at the state house, which then raises the bar for Washington DC to override those laws because people are going to be mad if Washington DC makes a weaker law than their own state law. So the the advice that I would give to Americans listening is actually go to your state representatives first and engage with them and push, push things along in your state house. And that's

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  going to have a stronger impact on what's going on in Washington DC in the big picture.

• 1:03:44Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I think the sad thing or the scary thing is that in 2020, if it's unlikely that all of this is going to have been washed through by the time that we get there. Yes, someone may have lost a couple of bullets of ammunition from their weapon with regards to the fact that had Cambridge Analytica, I mean, let's think about this as a different iteration of the world where the Cambridge Analytica scandal hadn't come out and they've got another four years of voter data and they got another four years of understanding behavioral change. Oh, my God, you're just totally at the mercy. But as you say, it's likely that these tactics are going to be used again. And realistically,

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  because of the way that they're done, it was the presentation in the documentary, like the reporter from The Guardian being targeted with what was actually a really funny, like very degrading, but very funny meme video. All of these sort of tactics that really understand what gets people engaged and what gets people going. We are at the mercy of our biases. We're just, you know, hairless apes as as we often get called. And inoculating ourselves from this sort of information is going to be incredibly difficult, I guess. I mean, are there any, apart from not using social media, are there any tactics that

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  people can use to help themselves with regards to that other than a critical eye?

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  I actually wouldn't even say don't use social media because as I used, I used it in the film. Twitter was an important weapon in my battle.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  So, social media can be used for good and it should be. And so, I actually don't think that people should delete their accounts. It doesn't really solve the problem. So, I think the key is to try to use these forces for good and for democracy and not for anti-democracy.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  As best you can, especially until we figure out how to better protect ourselves. So, yeah, I think it's mostly awareness and the right kind of skepticism. And to better understand like how these machines are manipulating us. Like, one of the things I like about the movie is the way that it integrates the interface of social media into the movie.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  So that, so that you realize that the manipulation is right there in front of you. The sort of slot machine user interfaces are the first layer of manipulation.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  And to think that, you know, it's these like, you know, guys who are hacking our minds with psyops. Even before you get there, it's just the slot machine of these buttons. And the way that it's affecting the neurotransmitters in our brains. You know, we have to start there and think about, you know, how these machines are. And the fact that Instagram has removed likes. Is starting to test that out. Is strong evidence that this realization that the manipulation happens right on the surface of these apps and interfaces, I think is a really important moment to question. Not just, you know, the boogeyman of Cambridge Analytica, but.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  The whole way we are spending most of our time.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  The entire ecosystem, right?

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:07:14Chris Williamson?

  It's a, I promise that I didn't give David my, um, my notes before that, but that was my finishing point. The fact that, um, we've done on this podcast 18 months ago, I did an episode called A Hacker in Your Pocket, which is after I heard the first Tristan Harris on Sam Harris podcast, which is what exposed me and a lot of the listeners to Time Well Spent and the Centre for Humane Technology and all that sort of stuff. Tristan's also now released his own podcast, which is fantastic. Um, you're totally right. On the surface, I was thinking like, this is so terrible. My reptile brain's being manipulated with red buttons and we've

• 1:07:55Chris Williamson?

  got, we've got entire posts that are a rundown of how to change your notification settings on iPhone so that you don't get triggered as much. And, you know, we're playing, we're playing up here thinking that we're pulling weeds out, whereas we're on top of an atomic bomb that's below it. And we're actually just like making no difference at all. Like, forget the fact that your phone wants you to be on your phone a fair bit and your attention span's gone down. Like, your entire worldview is being manipulated. It's so vast.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Yep. Yep, it is. It is, it is. And, you know, until you learn how the sausage is made, it's hard to appreciate it. You know?

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I agree. Um, so David, I really appreciate your time for coming on. If people want to find out more, first off, go watch The Great Hack on Netflix. Um, after that, any blogs that you would recommend or where can people get in touch with yourself or find out more?

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Sure. Um, so as it's depicted in the movie, I'm very active on Twitter and it's, um, so you can follow me on Prof Carroll and, um, happy to engage with people there. Um, and, uh, I think that's a good starting point. I, um, tend to post a lot of what I'm looking at. Um, and, uh, so I think it's a good jumping off point. Um, you won't find me on Facebook anymore. Um, but, uh,

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  But if you want to reach out directly to me, you can slide into my DMs and I can give you my email address.

• 1:09:39Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. David, I really do wish you luck with the rest of this campaign I'm going to be watching with a lot of interest. As I say, I'm sure that the listeners will be super excited to go down the rabbit holes that your Twitter provides. And yeah, we'll see, maybe in a year's time or something like that, we'll be able to do a catch-up episode and we'll be able to see where the state of the 2020 year has taken us and stuff like that. But for now, thank you so much.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  And be on the lookout for a twist in the fall to the way the movie ends. There's going to be a twist ending in a couple of months, so be on the lookout for that.

• 1:10:23Chris Williamson?

  Don't leave us with that openly, David. You're terrible. Well, on that note, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in. Professor Carl, we'll catch you later on.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for having me on, Chris.